Pope Leo's Peru Homecoming: Soft Power, Institutional Repair, and the Abuse Question That Won't Wait

The first US-born pope returns to his adopted country as a beloved local pastor — but behind the rapturous crowds, the Vatican is navigating clerical abuse accountability and the politics of a dual-citizenship pontiff.

Robert Prevost spent 20 years as a working pastor in Peru before becoming Pope Leo XIV, and his six-day return visit is being treated less like a state occasion than a hometown reunion. Tens of thousands lined Lima's streets on Wednesday; in Chiclayo, where he served as bishop until 2023, residents still call him "Padre Roberto." The itinerary — Lima, Chiclayo, the Andean town of Santa Cruz, the Afro-Peruvian town of Zaña, Cusco, and Pucallpa in the Amazon — reads like a deliberate map of Peru's ethnic and geographic diversity.

The personal history is genuine and well-documented. Prevost arrived as a 29-year-old Augustinian missionary in 1985, serving in Chulucanas, one of the country's poorest towns. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he delivered food aid and last rites in a country that recorded more than 219,000 deaths — among the highest per-capita figures globally. He raised $380,000 through Caritas to buy two oxygen plants when patients were dying in hospitals for lack of supply. When Venezuelan migrants flooded through Chiclayo in 2018, he established a commission on human mobility and human trafficking, processing roughly 3,500 families who settled in the region. The visit's emotional resonance is real, but so is the institutional tension running beneath it. Bishop Accountability, a US-based NGO, published a list of 77 Peruvian priests, brothers, and lay members accused of sexual abuse and pederasty just last week. Pope Francis dissolved the Peru-based Catholic movement Sodalitium over its abuses in 2025, yet Vatican sources indicate that conservative sectors of the Peruvian church may have shaped Leo's public agenda to avoid uncomfortable encounters with abuse victims. The pope is reportedly seeking private meetings with victims — the word "private" doing significant work. The dual-citizenship angle is historically unprecedented and strategically potent. As theologian José Luis Pérez Guadalupe notes, an unwritten rule long held that no pope would come from the United States due to its "dominant hegemonic power." Prevost's decades in Peru allowed the conclave to see him as a Latin American pontiff as much as an American one. This framing is not accidental — it allows the Vatican to project closeness to the Global South while holding a US passport. Prevost's pastoral style — walking streets, delivering aid by helicopter, appointing local women like Yolanda Díaz to lead commissions — built a form of institutional trust that the Catholic Church badly needs in Latin America, where evangelical Protestantism has been steadily eroding its base. The personal testimonies are consistent: he listened, resolved disputes face-to-face, and showed up physically during crises. The health dimension adds urgency. Leo had the lower lobe of his right lung removed after a cancer diagnosis a month ago, and doctors have since cleared him, but a six-day itinerary spanning coast, highlands, and Amazon jungle is gruelling for a 71-year-old post-surgery patient. The schedule itself is a statement: this is a pope who will not be managed from behind a desk. The core question is whether the personal goodwill translates into institutional reform. Chilean journalist Camila Bustamante, who exposed abuses in Sodalitium's female arm, received an invitation to meet the pope — a signal, but not yet a commitment. Silvia Alayo, who worked with Prevost at Peru's Episcopal Commission on Social Action, insists victims must receive reparations. The visit will be judged not by the size of the crowds but by whether "no tolerance" becomes a policy with teeth or remains a rhetorical inheritance from Francis.